neděle 3. června 2012

We had to read The Great Gatsby for a
literary seminar but I had been planning to read it for some time before that.
Unfortunately, I didn’t like the book very much.

The story
is pretty simple. Nick moves into a house next to a huge mansion whose owner
has bombastic parties all the time. He is not terribly well-off himself but has
rich friends – Tom and Daisy. When he’s having a dinner with them he meets
Jordan – a rich, young girl he likes – and also learns that Tom is cheating on
Daisy. He later becomes friends with his neighbor Jay Gatsby and attends to his
parties.

Well, the story actually isn’t so simple so I will somehow shorten it.
It is revealed that Jay knows Daisy and that he fell in love with her years
before but couldn’t marry her because he was poor and she was damned rich. He
actually became rich just to get on the same level as she is and they start
having an affaire. Daisy than has a craziest idea – to invite Nick, Jordan and Jay to their house. The whole
thing than gets crazier and crazier, half the characters die and it is really
pretty fucked up.

So what is it about? Yeah, well, mostly
about money and what it can do to you and what it can’t do for you. Which, as a
theme, got used up few centuries ago. It is of course partly psychological
novel about relationships and love. The love story is quite strong and an
important part of the book. It’s not the most important but it more or less
drives the narrative. It partly feels as a detective story because Nick keeps trying to find out what the hell
is going on and ultimately is the only one who knows it.

The greatest positive of this boos are its
poetic description. They are great just as they are but combined with the theme
of cold world of big money, they give the book a completely new dimension. I
really like this part:

“We
walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound
into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming
white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the
house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the
other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the
ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as
wind does on the sea.

The
only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which
two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were
both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had
just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have
stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the
groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the
rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and
the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The
younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her
end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as
if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she
saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it — indeed, I was
almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming
in.”

Well,
to sum it up, objectively, it is a good book. I just didn’t enjoy it very much,
maybe I was reading it too much only on the story level and didn’t really
bother thinking about it. But it is an important text, especially as one of
these American-dream-breaking books. On the other hand, I could have had led a
happy life even if I never read it.

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